In their everyday lives not many people are affected by international copyright law. When Marcus Hyde took the above photo in 2012, he never considered that it would one day be used by a pirate in another country.
In their everyday lives not many people are affected by international copyright law. When Marcus Hyde took the above photo in 2012, he never considered that it would one day be used by a pirate in another country. Why would he? A young freelance photographer traveling the country is more worried about his next meal than having his work stolen.
About a month ago, Marcus was on Instagram when he found a photo of a girl wearing a shirt with his image on it. Since that time that photo has gone viral, and currently has over 30,000 reblogs and climbing. As you can imagine, he was “extremely pissed,” as the company selling the shirt had claimed the image as original. Following the links on instagram, he located the company in question.
The company, Pijony, lives as a group on VK – Europe’s largest social network site, known as The European Facebook. It is run out of Moscow by a man named Vladimir Pijony. To order anything from Pijony, you have to be a member of the VK group, and the company doesn’t ship its products outside of Russia. Marcus found this out when he tried to order one of his own shirts, and was denied by Pijony. No doubt aware of their own theft, Pijony seems shy of dealing with anyone from the United States, perhaps in fear of prosecution.
So what can Marcus do about the situation? Russia and the United States are both members of the Berne Convention, an international copyright protection treaty. Under the Berne Convention, Russia must extend the same protection to an American copyrighted work as it would to a Russian work. That means that Marcus’s work is protected under Russian copyright law for up to 25 years after his death.
That’s the law, but what are Marcus’s options? He is not a large multinational with a team of lawyers to help him. Richmond lawyer Robert Tyler of McGuireWoods LLP has dealt with copyright law on a domestic and international level, and he had to this to say:
“An artist’s first step would be to contact the website hosting the sales, and if the complaint is legitimate and the site reputable, the site should stop those sales as a violation of its terms of service. At the same time, the owner of the infringing business should be notified of the infringement claim and told to stop the sales anywhere else. If neither of these actions has the desired effect, then the next step would be to hire a lawyer based in the country in question to represent the artist in a copyright infringement claim.”
Marcus has retained the services of a lawyer, and is attempting to contact Pijony and settle the matter. We’ll bring you updates on the situation once we have them.
We previously encountered the actions of Norfolk artist Rashidi Barrett, who was stealing ideas from foreign artists and presenting them as his own. Barrett ended up making a public apology and retiring from the art community, but before that occurred, he held several art shows featuring stolen work. This example is a demonstration of the fact that these thefts happen more often than you might think.
To check out more work from Marcus Hyde, go to his site at marcushydemedia.com, or check out our profile in the latest issue of RVA Magazine (which will be posted on our site soon).
